UPDATE: I have come across this interview with Sam Esmail where he delves more into Elliot's psychology and discusses his process of writing Mr. Robot. It contradicts several of the points made in my post below using Elliot and Mr. Robot as an example, but I'm leaving my post up as a problem with Entertainment in general, and acknowledging here that I was incorrect about Mr. Robot, Sam Esmail and Elliot.

Sam Esmail has proven, through this interview, to be portraying mental illness respectfully. Please read the interview.

I have schizoaffective disorder, bipolar type. I also have generalized anxiety disorder and PTSD. These three diagnoses don’t work so great in tandem together, but they all work within specific confines of signifiers that makes them diagnosable, treatable, and medicateable.

In Mr. Robot, the main character, Elliot, classified himself as “schizo.” Okay, let’s first forget about how much I hate that word and how every person on I’ve met on the schizophrenia spectrum hates that word, but whatever. But Elliot had a little bit more going on than schizophrenia. Schizophrenia includes a specific set of symptoms, both negative and positive. Some of the most popular of schizophrenia's symptoms include: hallucinations, delusions, paranoia, and disorganized speech.

But Elliot’s symptoms included PTSD flashbacks, the dissociation associated with dissociative disorder, and depression, along with schizophrenia's delusions and paranoia.

This is old hat, but it doesn't mean I have to like it. See, entertainment loves to do this. When they can’t find a diagnosis that’s exactly what they want on the batshit crazy spectrum, they call the person "schizophrenic" or "sociopathic" and give them a cocktail of symptoms knitted together from a hodgepodge of media.

That's not how it works, and it’s the main reason I’m not watching Mr. Robot, Season Two.

Mental Illnesses Are Not Convenient Plot Devices. They Are Real Things.

How about I illustrate it this way? When a character has Type II Diabetes, they don't also get left-side paralysis (stroke), and need a back brace (scoliosis), do they? No, they don't. Movies, TV, and books don’t give their physically sick characters a patchwork of symptoms pulled from the ICD-10. I don't know why this is, because apparently some writers think the DSM-V is a grab-bag at character creation.

This is just plain lazy. Why? I'll tell you why.

Writing within rulesets is what makes characters and worlds great. Why do monsters have rules? So the monster has limits to what it can do, otherwise Tokyo would have been toast. Why does magic have to come at a price? So it does not become overpowered, otherwise Lord of the Rings would have been the Gandalf/Saruman show. If a mental illness is not its defined self, it is not diagnosable, it is not treatable, and it is not medicateable.

Sure, plenty of mentally ill people shun treatment and medication, but the fact is, they can be helped, when they eventually choose to get help. I chose to get help, and even with my mental illness soup, I was able to get a Bachelor’s Degree, a Masters Degree, and do a career switch in between. After being declared disabled 8 years into that second career, I took up writing, which has gone pretty okay so far.

So those of us with multiple diagnoses aren’t lost causes, even when it may look like we back ourselves into corners with what we can only or cannot do. When we try hard enough and take care of ourselves well enough, we can do amazing things. We don’t become unpredictable timebombs of uncertain outcome like Elliot who can only be talked down by his own dissociative ramblings.

We build up our own coping mechanisms, because PTSD flashbacks are scary, hallucinations are scary, realizing you’ve been delusional is scary, being talked out of a paranoid thinking stream and understanding that you need more medication is the worst. The more I watched Season One of Mr. Robot, the more I grew frustrated with Elliot. I could see him breaking down and the hell he was collecting around himself, and even when he realized his father was dead, he didn’t break down enough not to seek that illusion out again.

I was so upset about this both as a mentally ill person and a former therapist that I almost didn’t watch the Season One finale. It was so incredibly unbelievable to me from both sides of the coin that I couldn’t understand where the writers got the idea that this was okay. And then I did watch the finale, and it was more like watching a series of PTSD flashbacks, without anything to flash back to.

Writing characters like this is so convenient, but it ignores that there are people out there who do actually have these diagnoses, and they don’t work this way. It ignores the writing rules of Research, and to People your work before you show it to the world. Pro Tip: Mentally ill people don’t foam at the mouth and some of us can give honest and well-thought-out critique.

So, just as you have people of different races, genders, religions, and sexual identities than you read your work for authenticity — have a mentally ill person read your work when it features mental illness. You’ll be surprised as to their input, as, although your reader may not wear their mental illness on their sleeve, it is a very big part of their lives, and they have opinions.

Like I said: Mental Illnesses Are Not Plot Devices.They Are Real Things.And They Happen To Real People.

So stop giving made up ones to made up people. It makes you look kind of silly to us.

UPDATE: I have come across this interview with Sam Esmail where he delves more into Elliot's psychology and discusses his process of writing Mr. Robot. It contradicts several of the points made in my post below using Elliot and Mr. Robot as an example, but I'm leaving my post up as a problem with Entertainment in general, and acknowledging here that I was incorrect about Mr. Robot, Sam Esmail and Elliot.

Sam Esmail has proven, through this interview, to be portraying mental illness respectfully. Please read the interview.